homemoney to purchasehow Certainly the most impressive and perhaps the most puzzling is the Harvard School of Business Administration. Founded over fifty years ago, this school's main course lasts for two years taking in each year 700 graduates most of whom have not yet served any time within industry. The school's philosophy is a rejection of the academic teaching of a body of principles and knowledge of management, and claims instead that the only man who can teach how to manage is the student himself; he must develop his own ability to size up business problems, to ferret out the facts, to discuss it with colleagues, to make his own decisions, and then to accept the hard truth of real business life that he may never know whether his decision was in fact 'right'! For this reason the professors never profess, they never 'correct' the students, never give the school solution, their only purpose is to guide the students to the arduous process of finding out for themselves. Harvard's main instrument for this process of selfdevelopment is the case study. Over 20,000 of these have been compiled : each of them is a presentation of an actual business situation, supported by a detailed background of facts, conditions, and history, recorded sometimes by weeks of research by an investigator. The scale of the Harvard operation is immense (the library alone cost ten million dollars) and its prestige is such that it can take the pick of the promising young men. Its very prestige makes it difficult to judge the real validity of stressing the case study method so far, since its graduates are in any case likely to succeed in business, and will later support the Harvard method as a consequence of their own identification with it. The Harvard faculty themselves recognize the problem of validating methods of training for management, and have undertaken considerable research projects, not only to find out what improvement in a manager results from a training, but, more basically, whether there can be any method of judging improvement. The problem is not so much of finding an answer to a question, but of finding out what questions should be asked. Until some valid, if not necessarily objective, way can be evolved of assessing methods of training, it is necessary to suspend judgement on the claims of the case study method of giving the student artificial experience, as against a more classical approach to the teaching of the theory and practice of management on the one hand, and of real experience gained by spending the equivalent time in business. The brief look at Harvard must also mention the Advanced Management Programme, a threemonth course for matured senior executives who may be of president level. The role of this is similar to that of the British Henley course, though the methods used are somewhat different. Most other American universities offer a course in Business Administration. homemoney to purchasehow